Poverty Knowledge : Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U. S. Hist...

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Progressive-era "poverty warriors" cast poverty in America as a problem of unemployment, low wages, labor exploitation, and political disfranchisement. In the 1990s, policy specialists made "dependency" the issue and crafted incentives to get people off welfare.Poverty Knowledgegives the first comprehensive historical account of the thinking behind these very different views of "the poverty problem," in a century-spanning inquiry into the politics, institutions, ideologies, and social science that shaped poverty research and policy. Alice O'Connor chronicles a transformation in the study of poverty, from a reform-minded inquiry into the political economy of industrial capitalism to a detached, highly technical analysis of the demographic and behavioral characteristics of the poor. Along the way, she uncovers the origins of several controversial concepts, including the "culture of poverty" and the "underclass." She shows how such notions emerged not only from trends within the social sciences, but from the central preoccupations of twentieth-century American liberalism: economic growth, the Cold War against communism, the changing fortunes of the welfare state, and the enduring racial divide. The book details important changes in the politics and organization as well as the substance of poverty knowledge. Tracing the genesis of a still-thriving poverty research industry from its roots in the War on Poverty, it demonstrates how research agendas were subsequently influenced by an emerging obsession with welfare reform. Over the course of the twentieth century, O'Connor shows, the study of poverty became more about altering individual behavior and less about addressing structural inequality. The consequences of this steady narrowing of focus came to the fore in the 1990s, when the nation's leading poverty experts helped to end "welfare as we know it." O'Connor shows just how far they had traveled from their field's original aims.

Alice O'Connor is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was formerly the Assistant Director of the Project on Social Welfare and the American Future at the Ford Foundation and the Director for the Programs on Persistent Urban Poverty and International Migration at the Social Science Research Council.

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

3

(20)

PART ONE

23

(114)

Origins: Poverty and Social Science in The Era of Progressive Reform

25

(30)

Poverty Knowledge as Cultural Critique: The Great Depression

55

(19)

From the Deep South to the Dark Ghetto: Poverty Knowledge, Racial Liberalism, and Cultural ``Pathology''

74

(25)

Giving Birth to a ``Culture of Poverty'': Poverty Knowledge in Postwar Behavioral Science, Culture, and Ideology

99

(25)

Community Action

124

(13)

PART TWO

137

(74)

In the Midst of Plenty: The Political Economy of Poverty in the Affluent Society

139

(27)

Fighting Poverty with Knowledge: The Office of Economic Opportunity and the Analytic Revolution in Government

166

(30)

Poverty's Culture Wars

196

(15)

PART THREE

211

(86)

The Poverty Research Industry

213

(29)

Dependency, the ``Underclass,'' and a New Welfare ``Consensus'': Poverty Knowledge for a Post--Liberal, Postindustrial Era